UNTO OTHERS

In March a 21-year-old man killed eight people, six of them Asian, at three Atlanta area massage parlors. Cops attributed the rampage to the White perp’s hatred of his own sex addiction, but local Asian Americans saw more: “xenophobia” aimed at them, as Georgia state Representative Bee Nguyen put it. The slaughter was the most savage of a year-long spate of incidents in which Asian Americans going about their lives were insulted, harassed, or beaten, often to the tune of rants about Covid: “You are infected,” “You are the virus,” et cetera ad nauseam. “We’ve gone from being invisible to being seen as subhuman,” wrote U.S. Representative Grace Meng (D-New York).

This story began over 150 years ago. Until